


Revolutionary Girl

by aron_kristina



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Community: thegameison_sh, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-04
Updated: 2011-04-04
Packaged: 2017-10-17 14:14:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 516
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/177704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aron_kristina/pseuds/aron_kristina
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Alice once told her mother that she was going to rule the world when she grew up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Revolutionary Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by C. Written for thegameison_sh younger/older challenge.

Alice once told her mother that she was going to rule the world when she grew up. She was just a kid when she said it, six years old, and her mother had laughed at her, and patted her on the head, and told her that when she grew up she would change her mind. Other things would be more important. (She pretends she doesn’t cry herself to sleep for a week.)

Essay writing. Subject: Where I see myself in ten years. Alice writes about becoming a nurse, about helping to do some good in the world, about getting married and having kids. Ten years have taught her that she can’t have big dreams, what will ten more years really do?

People get worried if they see you reading de Beauvoir, Butler and thick books on political structure. (Good girls read romance novels.) Her parents won’t pay for subscriptions to magazines about the world, in-depth analysis and interesting thoughts. Instead they want her to read Cosmopolitan.

All that Cosmopolitan has taught her is to blend in. Dressing up in silly clothes and painting her face is tedious, but for some reason people respect her even less when she doesn’t bother. She thinks of it like war paint, or a disguise (teaching herself how to blend in and be the stereotype instead of Alice). At sixteen she’s known for a long time that she’s smarter than the rest of the world, and it pains her to play the role of a stupid girl. All the money and time spent, it is the perfect prison. She suspects, but hasn’t had it confirmed, that the other female people around her also play their roles. (Simone has taught her one isn’t born a woman.)

She wants a revolution, she wants change, even though she has read about it and knows that the slow changes are the most effective. You change people without them realizing (but it’s too slow). She can’t wait much longer. (But she can’t change the world yet.) Her high school is conservative and boring and her parents will not let her go to another school. She could move away from them, but she needs to save up money, so she doesn’t.

Alice doesn’t have friends, as such, but she has a feminist discussion group on Thursdays. When one of the older women there tells them about being raped in her youth Alice almost has to leave the room. She decides then and there to start learning some kind of martial arts, and get pepper spray. (No one is going to touch her body. No one.)

Alice knows she has to bide her time, and wait, so she keeps her head down as well as she can. She blends in with the other girls, pretending not to want anything other than a rich husband. Sooner or later the opportunity will show up, the opportunity to make her own opportunity, because no one will give her the world on a plate, but it is hers to take, (the world is her oyster) as soon as she figures out how.


End file.
